The Sport of Kings

by C. E. Morgan

  “Goddamn right,” said Mack, and he popped his white, off-season Stetson back onto his graying head. “I’ll get your little girl up and running.”

  * * *

  Mack was looking for an excuse and it didn’t take him long to find it. One look at the kid made your own temperature go up. He was a walking fever—unsteady on his feet, his hands limp as rub rags; he was leaning into Hell like she was the support post and he was the sagging roof. Mack surveyed the situation with distaste, his lip curled, before he said, “I had no everloving idea black boys could turn pink. What in the name of God’s wrong with you?”

  Allmon didn’t dare look up or the whole barn would swirl the drain. He still felt sideways with alcohol, but that didn’t make sense. It had been too long. “I’m off,” is all he said.

  “Well, don’t lean on my goddamn broke horse, kid. If you’re sick, I don’t want you in here. They can catch what you got.” His voice was hard, but when Allmon turned his watery, febrile eyes on him, Mack didn’t look angry. “Get to a doctor. I can’t even believe I’m fucking saying it, but take a couple hours and go to a doctor.”

  “I can’t afford it.” Allmon didn’t even have to ponder that.

  “Well,” said Mack, and it bothered him a bit, the kid didn’t look right, but he wasn’t going to back down now. “Get out of here either way.”

  Mack stood there in the stall and watched him limp off. Then he finished up the rub job with cursory movements and cogitated on the issue a bit more, took stock of the blue air cast around Hell’s leg. He scratched with some irritation at his three o’clock stubble. On the one hand, things were getting tighter around the track, and you could feel it gathering like a storm; there was railbird chatter about a congressional crackdown right around the corner. On the other hand, that was Later and this was Right Fucking Now. On a totally different hand, this stuff could shrink up ovaries and screw up estrus, but on another hand, that’s what long-term infertility insurance was for. On the fourth hand if you were counting: Hell was a filly; it wasn’t as if Mack was risking his share on some hot stud. But on the most important hand of all, while it wouldn’t make her run faster, it sure as shit would speed recovery, and recovery was half the game, especially for the Preakness. Besides, Hell didn’t need more speed; she’d already bested the best. There simply wasn’t another horse like her, and everybody knew it. But—goddammit—that’s exactly why Mack just stood there motionless with the syringe in his hand instead of jabbing it into her rump and pressing the plunger. He’d perfected the art of bulking his ponies way back when he was running quarter horses up in dusty, middle-grade Wyoming, his motto: What separates the best from the rest is the best don’t get caught. But the fact was he’d never seen a horse like this, at least not since 1973. She made him feel like a kid again, idealistic. He couldn’t help but want to see what she could do on her own, without any help. So, against his better judgment, feeling like someone entirely unlike Mack Snyder, he repocketed the syringe of Winstrol and stepped out of the stall.

  * * *

  A year ago, there would have been a winter to describe—a palace of ice, hoarse winds that wound white ribbons around the houses with strange gunslinger lightning at Christmas. But this was a new year. The winter was unusually cold. It snowed heavily. That’s all I can tell you.

  * * *

  In the dark heart of January, Henry was startled awake by a shrilling phone. Mack on the other end, his crude holler of triumph nearly indistinguishable from anger.

  “Henry!” he barked. “Henry, we got it!”

  Henry worked to draw his mind round. “Got what?”

  “Eclipse Award! Two-Year-Old Filly!” The air was charged with his waiting, but when Henry didn’t speak, Mack barreled on. “Awards are in Beverly Hills on January twenty-second. I’ll be coming from Sarasota, so I’ll meet you there. It’ll be at the Wilshire Hotel. They make a damned good old-fashioned.”

  Henry cleared his throat. “I won’t be there.”

  Now it was Mack’s turn to be silent. He stopped pacing to peer mystified around his office, as though it had vanished before his eyes and he’d suddenly found himself in a bleak and barren wasteland.

  “You’re staying home,” he snapped shortly. “You—why?”

  “Samuel.”

  “Samuel fucking who?”

  “Samuel’s having recurrent ear infections and until that’s cleared up, his pediatrician advised that we not fly. He goes where I go. Period.”

  Mack tried twice to speak and failed. He tried again. He sounded like a jalopy engine sputtering. “You’re staying home from the Eclipse Awards to take care of a baby?”

  “Yes,” said Henry.

  There was a silence as beautiful, delicate, and clean as Venetian glass. Then: “Okay!” Mack snapped. “Okay! We’ve worked for this for ten fucking years. Yes. WHAT???” And he flung down his cell phone with such force that the casing snapped and the battery went spinning out his office door like a small satellite careening out of orbit. Stalking to the row, he made a crazed, animalistic sound deep in his throat and grabbed his startled assistant trainer by the lapel so the young man flailed, thinking this was it, this was the moment when Mack would finally haul off and punch him in the fucking throat, but Mack just hollered, “Will someone please tell me where the fucking sane people live?!”

  * * *

  Which is not what he said into the cavernous ballroom at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel standing before thirteen hundred of the country’s wealthiest and most ambitious horse trainers and owners, circled by the track writers and videographers who recorded it all for posterity.

  Mack stood in the glare of the evening’s lights, the whole fancy boondoggle sparkling in its black-tie finery, all those acquisitive eyes focused on him, his Zuni bolo tie suddenly feeling not unlike a noose. God, how he hated this primped-up bullshit, and he’d never forgive Henry for making him puke up a speech on his behalf, but Mack knew that horse better than anyone else, so he guessed he was the only other man for the job. He shifted at the podium, put those red, perma-chapped hands to the hips of his pressed jeans, and said, “Y’all know I’m no speech giver. I don’t care for talk if there’s horses to be trained and races to be run. But, it’s January, there’s nothing going, it’s the Eclipse Awards. I’ll talk for a spell.”

  He sniffed hard, looked out at those expectant faces, all of whom had seen the filly run her races and knew what kind of extraordinary thing he was dealing with here. She was more than high-quality stock, more than good legs, more than brass lungs. She was hunger, and you couldn’t buy that.

  He said, “I’ve been running horses since I was yay high, and I’ve been training them since I was twenty and a half. Let no man say that I don’t know a great horse when I see one. And by love of God and money, Hellsmouth is a great horse.”

  There was rambunctious applause and hollering, but he just talked right over it. “This big black filly isn’t just the best horse I’ve ever trained. She’s the best goddamned racehorse I’ve ever seen. And she’s just getting started.” He paused. “That’s all.”

  He stepped off the podium amidst the clapping and not a little eye rolling from those who’d rather have seen him shot than win another purse, and the genuine applause of the men and women he’d made rich. He shook a couple of hands on the way back to his table, where his drinking could be resumed, and he didn’t think, How the hell did some poor Letcher County kid end up here with the brightest and best, but: They ought to pay to eat the dirt under my boots. I turn the mill wheel. Blue-blood silver-spoon trust-fund bastards.

  As if on cue, Stu Penderson, a Woodford County acquaintance of some forty years, clapped him abruptly on the back and said, “Where’s that old rascal Henry tonight?”

  Mack scowled openly; he didn’t even try to hide his disgust. “You don’t want to know,” is all he said as he tugged loose his bolo tie and returned to his drink to suffer the rest of the banquet alone until he found some lonely desperado who would s
uffer him in turn.

  * * *

  I don’t care who you are—a breeder of champions, the scion of scions—a crying baby can bring you to your knees. Henry was snatched from sleep for the third time that night, prisoner to Samuel’s wailing. Nothing in the world could soothe him, not the whirring of a fan, no amount of sweet talk or pacing. He refused the bottle, he struggled righteously against a fresh diaper, he waved his fat arms in fury, and screamed over Henry’s lullabies as if to wake the world with his frustrations.

  After an hour of it, Henry was nearly in tears himself, and there was nothing left to try but read from Henrietta’s notebooks, the soft roll of his reading voice serving as a balm, the words a communiqué from another world. Henry arranged Samuel, beet red and squalling, in the valley of his lap, then flipped through the pages. This was a shared habit of their mornings and nights, looking for something he hadn’t yet read. Here was a chart of worms in Kentucky soils, a diagram of the Cincinnati Arch, a quote about the men of Tierra del Fuego killing old women before dogs, because dogs are more useful. Finally, he found a fresh page and read over Samuel’s cries: “Gene Schwartz Jefferson Lecture, transcribed from Penn’s tape.”

  The speech was scrawled in excerpts that covered a half dozen pages. Henry transformed the words into a parent’s singsong as he read: “‘I am a farmer and always have been. When I was born, this country supported thirty-two million farmers. My mother used the Farmer’s Almanac to teach me to read, and my father took me out in the fields before I was even able to walk and instructed me properly in the art of plantation. I was educated in the very best sense of the word.

  “‘But something has gone amiss in the almost sixty years since I was born. Today, America has only four million farms. That is less than two percent of the population—less than two percent! Can you think of anything less significant than that? Yes, one percent, and it’s coming. We’re on a slippery slope to a postagricultural hell. The how and why of this turn of events is a painful story, and a portentous one if the best predictor of the future is the past.’”

  The singsong lilt slipped from Henry’s voice. Samuel was hiccupping his way into calm, listening now with rapt attention, his wide, deep gaze locked on Henry’s face.

  “‘… We live in a consumptive world, where we consume more food than we need, where animals are forced to consume our cast-off poisons and the bodies of their own species, where we use more of the world’s resources than is right, where we empower corporations, which consume the lives of their workers with all the blessings of our government, which grants them the same rights and recognitions historically reserved for humans by the Fourteenth Amendment—the amendment designed to guarantee slaves their status as human beings! This, my friends, is consumption. And if you will recall, consumption is an insidious disease, creating for much of its progress the illusion of increased vitality. It promises health, but it delivers death.

  “‘We founded this nation under the illusory notion of independence, and we have suffered from that disastrous ideal ever since, this notion that a man’s life is entirely distinct from the life of his neighbor; that the poisons in his water have no bearing on the cleanliness of his neighbor’s water; that the suffering of a laborer has no direct relationship to the purchaser of goods; that animals are objects for sale; that the health of the land is divorced from the health of the collective. We’ve turned freedom from tyranny into freedom from each other.

  “‘In the 1700s, when we fought our war for supposed independence, we were actually securing our rightful dependence upon the land, upon each other, and upon our deepest religious impulses, which cannot be governed by a king, but only by mystical union with … We have always been trying to establish a mystical union with what is ultimately ineffable. This invisible reality leaves its mark everywhere; in friendship, intimacy, prayer without dogmatism, laughter, compassion. Camus said man’s only real choice is whether or not to commit suicide. I say when we choose not to commit suicide, our reasons for living divulge the meaning of life itself. They give voice to the ineffable. And all of those reasons for living point us toward community, rather than singularity and division.

  “‘… These days, I’m often accused of being a moralist, but if this is a critique, if being called a moralist is now an insult, then it merely indicates how far we’ve fallen and how resolute and inflexible our relativism has become. Unlike many of you, I was born immediately after the Second World War. If the twentieth century was not a clarion call for humanity to awaken and choose sides, what could possibly wake us? It was a time for staking moral claims. Yet our sleepwalking culture persists in looking for the easy answer, waiting for someone to tell us what to think. I’m not here to tell you how and what to consume, what technologies to embrace or avoid, how to organize your communities, how to vote, how to live. America has many ills, but none greater than the refusal of so many to think long and hard, to think critically. We must learn to be choosers, not merely receivers; to be self-critical; to cast a suspicious eye on the powers that be, including one’s own unearned power. We want easy answers, but we must refuse them. The only true answer is to think.’”

  Samuel was finally deeply asleep. He lay there, Henry’s right hand a warm cradle under his head, his breath coming in even passes and collecting around them both as a pocket of warmth. Looking down at him, Henry’s heart beat a complicated rhythm. He remembered suddenly his own daughter as a child, so flush with life, a life he had always assumed was indistinct from his. Yet, here he was holding her difference in his very hands even after her death. In life, he had held up her flesh only as a mirror. Now a complication was rising like bile; it was bitter with the first taste of regret.

  Barely able to turn his gaze from Samuel’s face, Henry fumbled back through the leaves of the notebook, looking for something he had spied earlier. Yes, there it was: a Sandgap address for Penn, presumably the same one who owned the tape. An 859 telephone number. Under the number, scrawled in Henrietta’s impatient handwriting, he read the sentence again: The movement of evolution is from simple to complex.

  * * *

  Animalia—Chordata—Vertebrata—Aves—Passeriformes—Hirundinidae—Progne subis: In one of the many mysteries of spring, the purple martins, our loyal, royal swallows, return in pairs to their high nesting grounds in the hills of Kentucky. Here, their young fledge every year. They come in monogamous pairs as if a compass were guiding them, driven forward by a wild, inborn sense of the sun and the poles, a knowledge deep within the eye that has little to do with sight.

  I was and am forever trapped not by Father, but by myself. Until I become a god or a bird. Irony is life’s central condition. A god experiences no limitations, which is why it cannot exist. Or if a god exists, you cannot experience it or think about it or know it, because it has no explicable border. What can’t be talked about is not worth talking about. That’s what I mean by irony.

  She followed him everywhere, even as he traveled like one of those martins, drawn inexorably back to his place of origin. The farm he found—if you could call it that—was a humble copestone atop the outer fortifications of the mountains. A proper gentleman’s farm perhaps fifty years prior, the white farmhouse long shorn of its beauty, and the Lincoln log corncrib slumping to rot in the rocky soil. Of the numerous pastures fitted onto these high flats, fully half were unturned, and Henry soon saw why. A man—presumably the man he sought—was struggling in the right field with a plow and two thick-necked oxen. What old-time conceit was this? They seemed ghosts of the previous century, now stymied in the mud, the blade of the plow lodged in the late February muck, the oxen sunk to their fetlocks in the mire. One ox brayed heavily as if in warning when it spotted Henry’s car. Like an animal sensing danger, the driver remained very still for a moment, shielding his brow, then he raised one muddy hand in greeting, and Henry returned the gesture.

  The man called out across the pasture, “Boots on the porch!”

  There were old, weather-crackled LaCr
osse hunters behind Henry on the warped porch boards. He slipped off his fine loafers and pressed his feet and wool trouser hems into the mud-caked boots. Then he trudged out into the early-spring fields, feeling foolish and vaguely abused. But this man had known his daughter.

  The man had gray and black hair, thick as a barge rope and cinched by an elastic at the nape. Gray-green eyes and freckles, incongruous on a face so lined—lined less by age perhaps than a life spent outside hunting and drinking and doing this, tending to a thankless plot of land attached to a threadbare home. Couple of curs for company. A talent for home brew. An old truck, some pornography, some pot. It wasn’t hard to imagine.

  Before Henry could introduce himself, the man pointed to the ground where the old moldboard plow was lodged and said, “Not much rain this week, but there’s this funny spot”—he gestured at the declivity where the field sloped gently like the sides of a French salad bowl—“and I forgot … it holds rain. I fill it every spring and harrow around it … but it sinks again every winter.” The man had something slow and untutored about him, or it seemed that way because of his measured speech, but he had wide, watchful eyes that took quiet notes on everything around him, even as his mouth was busy with something else.

  Henry said, “You should have plowed in the fall.” It startled him that he remembered that; it had been over forty years since he’d last witnessed a laying-in.

  “Had pneumonia,” the man said simply, then gestured at the coulter and share, wedged deep in the mud. “You guide these guys … and I can press the plow. Straight like an arrow now.”

  Henry did as the man asked, standing at the shoulder of the enormous lead ox with one hand to its bridle, and when Penn gave a heaving, half-angry cry of encouragement in the plow lines, the oxen impended forward as one, and—twice, thrice, four times, they did this until the man’s voice was nearly wracked with calling “Git up!” and, with a sucking slosh and a spattering of fresh, clean mud, the plow moved forward and continued to trundle along the earth. Down the row they went, unfurling a slow wave of brown soil, the traces tinkling. Henry let loose the bridle of the lead ox and Penn drove the train with ease now that they had achieved level ground. Comparatively free, the oxen moved swiftly along and Henry watched as the chest of the earth was sliced open. The exposed earth wriggled with life: Lumbricus terrestris, Narceus americanus, Procellio scaber, Armadillidium nasatum, Talpa europaea, Walckenaeria acuminata, and all the Kingdom Monera and all the Kingdom Protista. His daughter knew them all by heart. These bottom-feeder servants would now feast on the remains of the supposedly higher plants.